Posts Tagged "dinosaurs"

Editor’s Note: MSU China Paleontology Expedition is a project led by Frankie D. Jackson and David J. Varricchio, professors in the Department of Earth Sciences, Dinosaur Paleontology at Montana State University and Jin Xingsheng, paleontologist and Vice Director of the Zhejiang Natural History Museum in Hangzhou, China. This is the second year this program sent [...]

Midway through the school year, parents and teachers are starting to plan (and fundraise) for winter and spring field trips. Among the most popular destinations is the science museum. The Association of Science-Technology Centers estimates that 12.1 million children in the United States visited science museums as part of a school group in 2013, accounting [...]

Rachel Horsting is a teacher-turned-writer who sometimes gets lonely for teenage enthusiasm when typing away. She currently lives in the Cambridge, Massachusetts area, reveling in the constant flow of scientific discovery.

Last week, a very prominent artist in the paleontology community somewhat publicly blew a gasket. His tirade started a conversation that has been sorely in need of attention for some time now. At issue is a fundamental conflict of interests: between science and its tradition of cumulative knowledge, and the rights of the artists who [...]

Kalliopi Monoyios is an independent science illustrator. She has illustrated several popular science books including Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish and The Universe Within, and Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True. Find her at www.kalliopimonoyios.com.
Kalliopi can be found on Twitter as @symbiartic.

You had no reason to expect a good weekend as you began a long-dreaded yard project. Come Monday morning’s office discussions of sporting events and parties, you would be nursing an aching back. But with a single strike of your shovel, your yard gave you a story to top any tale of drunken debauchery recounted [...]

It never fails. Whenever scientists announce the discovery of a hitherto unknown fossil species intermediate between two already known forms there is always one newspaper or magazine that calls it a "missing link". Score another point for evolutionary science—another gap in the fossil record has been filled in. I hate the phrase "missing link". It [...]

Hanny Van Arkel is a 25-year-old school teacher who lives in Holland with her German Shepherd, Janey. She enjoys playing the guitar and loves Brian May. She also found the first-ever voorwerp. Hanny is a citizen scientist. Hanny’s voorwerp (meaning object in Dutch), is a weird green blob spotted by Hanny in 2008. It is [...]

Welcome to the third (and final) article in my little series on the dinosaur(s) once known as Iguanodon. As we’ve seen in the previous parts, Iguanodon of traditional usage – Iguanodon sensu lato – has recently been blasted into numerous separate genera. As we’ll see here, while some of these taxonomic changes are likely to [...]

Darren Naish is a science writer, technical editor and palaeozoologist (affiliated with the University of Southampton, UK). He mostly works on Cretaceous dinosaurs and pterosaurs but has an avid interest in all things tetrapod. His publications can be downloaded at darrennaish.wordpress.com. He has been blogging at Tetrapod Zoology since 2006. Check out the Tet Zoo podcast at tetzoo.com! Darren can be found on Twitter as @TetZoo.

Iguanodon of tradition (or Iguanodon sensu lato, if you will) was a huge, sprawling monster, containing numerous species spread across about 40 million years of geological history. Welcome to the second article in this series (part 1 here). In the previous article we looked at the Purbeck Limestone iguanodontian Owenodon – originally named as a [...]

Darren Naish is a science writer, technical editor and palaeozoologist (affiliated with the University of Southampton, UK). He mostly works on Cretaceous dinosaurs and pterosaurs but has an avid interest in all things tetrapod. His publications can be downloaded at darrennaish.wordpress.com. He has been blogging at Tetrapod Zoology since 2006. Check out the Tet Zoo podcast at tetzoo.com! Darren can be found on Twitter as @TetZoo.

One of the most familiar and historically significant of dinosaur names is Iguanodon, named in 1825 for teeth and bones discovered in the Lower Cretaceous rocks of the Cuckfield region of East Sussex, southern England. Everyone who’s ever picked up a dinosaur book will be familiar with the legendary – yet mostly apocryphal – tale [...]

Darren Naish is a science writer, technical editor and palaeozoologist (affiliated with the University of Southampton, UK). He mostly works on Cretaceous dinosaurs and pterosaurs but has an avid interest in all things tetrapod. His publications can be downloaded at darrennaish.wordpress.com. He has been blogging at Tetrapod Zoology since 2006. Check out the Tet Zoo podcast at tetzoo.com! Darren can be found on Twitter as @TetZoo.

Source: 500-Pound “Chicken from Hell” Dinosaur Once Roamed North America by Kate Wong at Observations Illustration credit: Mark Klingler, Carnegie Museum of Natural History Nothing you could find in any hen house could prepare you for the 11.5-foot tall, 500-lb. behemoth that roamed the landscape 66-million years ago in what is today North and South [...]

Kalliopi Monoyios is an independent science illustrator. She has illustrated several popular science books including Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish and The Universe Within, and Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True. Find her at www.kalliopimonoyios.com.
Kalliopi can be found on Twitter as @symbiartic.

Move over platypus, a recently discovered dinosaur may have bested you for the strangest combination of physical features. Two hundred million years ago, a two-foot- long, beaked biped covered in quills scampered about an area that is now part of South Africa. The dinosaur’s discoverer is paleontologist Paul Sereno, of the University of Chicago. Sereno [...]

As the Blog Editor at Scientific American, I come to New York City about once a month to work in the office, attend editorial meetings, and prepare the blog network for launch some time in the near future. This week, I was in town at just the right time to join our intrepid team of [...]

Fitting fossils together to assemble massive dinosaur skeletons is certainly no small feat. Fleshing one out—inside and out—from tooth to tail is an even more challenging undertaking, especially when the subject is an 18-meter-long sauropod. Experts in animal nutrition, sports medicine, biomechanics and materials science joined paleontologists to re-create a full-sized model of Mamenchisaurus that [...]

Katherine Harmon Courage is a freelance writer and contributing editor for Scientific American. Her book Octopus! The Most Mysterious Creature In the Sea is out now from Penguin/Current. Katherine can be found on Twitter as @KHCourage.

Some extinct animals have anatomical oddities that seem destined to be confined to the marginalia of history. Questionable characters, such as the single-fingered dinosaur and the flightless, club-winged bird, ultimately died off despite—if not because of—their idiosyncratic adaptations. Now, researchers have described a perplexing, long-extinct creature, this time with some dubious dental assets: large saber [...]

Katherine Harmon Courage is a freelance writer and contributing editor for Scientific American. Her book Octopus! The Most Mysterious Creature In the Sea is out now from Penguin/Current. Katherine can be found on Twitter as @KHCourage.

Although today’s awe-inspiritng African Bush Elephant (Loxodonta africana) might seem a mighty beast, it’s a fraction of the size of ancient mammals that roamed the Earth 37 million to 2.7 million years ago. The Eocene and Oligocene’s Indricotherium measured in at more than five meters tall, and the Miocene and Pleistocene’s Deinotherium likely weighted some [...]

Katherine Harmon Courage is a freelance writer and contributing editor for Scientific American. Her book Octopus! The Most Mysterious Creature In the Sea is out now from Penguin/Current. Katherine can be found on Twitter as @KHCourage.

Researchers have pieced together a set of puzzling fossils from a stocky dinosaur discovered in Romania. The newly described predator helps to flesh out the spotty fossil record of carnivorous animals from Europe’s Cretaceous. The dinosaur, Balaur bondoc, was a sharp-clawed theropod that lived among small island creatures when sea levels were high and the [...]

Katherine Harmon Courage is a freelance writer and contributing editor for Scientific American. Her book Octopus! The Most Mysterious Creature In the Sea is out now from Penguin/Current. Katherine can be found on Twitter as @KHCourage.

A rare fossil find of two young feathered theropods has revealed that these animals sprouted a much wider range of plumage as they matured than contemporary birds do. Researchers, led by Xing Xu of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, have described the specimens as Similicaudipteryx [...]

Katherine Harmon Courage is a freelance writer and contributing editor for Scientific American. Her book Octopus! The Most Mysterious Creature In the Sea is out now from Penguin/Current. Katherine can be found on Twitter as @KHCourage.

When Pangaea finally broke up, some 200 million years ago, the result was a lot of heat. Specifically, volcanism, as enormous flows of basalt burst to the surface, ultimately covering more than nine million square kilometers. It wasn’t just the death of a supercontinent; it was also one of Earth’s five major extinction events—and the [...]

Avian dinosaurs—aka birds—have a streamlined way of breathing. Instead of sending air in and out of tiny sacs in the lungs like some other animals do, their breath flows in a single direction through a series of tubes. A new study reveals that birds are not alone in this adaptation: alligators also rely on this [...]

Katherine Harmon Courage is a freelance writer and contributing editor for Scientific American. Her book Octopus! The Most Mysterious Creature In the Sea is out now from Penguin/Current. Katherine can be found on Twitter as @KHCourage.

A rare horned dinosaur known as Torosaurus may not be a distinct species, after all, according to a presentation given Friday at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in Bristol, England. Researchers have long recognized similarities between Torosaurus and Triceratops, the main distinctions being that Torosaurus is larger and has an expanded [...]

For three years now we have been celebrating science artists here on Symbiartic. Every September we have stepped it up a notch to feature a different science artist each day in our September SciArt Blitz. In case you missed any of them, here is a visual summary of the 2014 SciArt Blitz artists (click on [...]

Kalliopi Monoyios is an independent science illustrator. She has illustrated several popular science books including Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish and The Universe Within, and Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True. Find her at www.kalliopimonoyios.com.
Kalliopi can be found on Twitter as @symbiartic.

There are two kinds of illustrators. Those, like myself who bend fine art and other forms into the service of illustration – and then there are illustrators like Niroot Puttapipat (a.k.a. Himmapaan) who follow in the rich tradition of book illustrators like Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac. In the handling of his art materials and [...]

Take a break from the heat this summer to step into some cool galleries exhibiting scienceart. If the exhibits keep pouring in at this rate, I’ll have to split up this post by region. There are five scienceart exhibits in New York alone! But for those of you who are not in the NY-region, don’t [...]

Kalliopi Monoyios is an independent science illustrator. She has illustrated several popular science books including Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish and The Universe Within, and Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True. Find her at www.kalliopimonoyios.com.
Kalliopi can be found on Twitter as @symbiartic.

This is the dish on the latest exhibits combining science and art around the country. This time the prize for the most bumpin’ scienceArt scene goes to the Northeast, amirite? Lucky you if you live there: EXHIBITS: NORTHEAST REGION JESSICA DRENK: An Allegory of Algorithms and Aesthetics April 12 – May 12, 2014 Adah Rose [...]

Kalliopi Monoyios is an independent science illustrator. She has illustrated several popular science books including Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish and The Universe Within, and Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True. Find her at www.kalliopimonoyios.com.
Kalliopi can be found on Twitter as @symbiartic.

Looking for a knock-out gift for the science geek in your life? Look no further. If you like art and you like science, these artists, all featured on Symbiartic at one point, have gifts that will impress even the most jaded gift recipients… Made With Molecules Jewelry by Raven Hanna, PhD. Raven Hanna, PhD. left [...]

Kalliopi Monoyios is an independent science illustrator. She has illustrated several popular science books including Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish and The Universe Within, and Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True. Find her at www.kalliopimonoyios.com.
Kalliopi can be found on Twitter as @symbiartic.

I think it’s the eyes. There is a lot of paleoart out there, and we feature a lot of it here on Symbiartic. Something about dinosaurs attracts some of the very best nature and science illustrators out there. I suspect some kind of love of science plus childhood nostalgia drives all of the dinophilia images [...]

Kalliopi Monoyios is an independent science illustrator. She has illustrated several popular science books including Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish and The Universe Within, and Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True. Find her at www.kalliopimonoyios.com.
Kalliopi can be found on Twitter as @symbiartic.

How many times do you have to do something before it is considered tradition? Last year, Glendon had the excellent idea to post a different #sciart image each day in the month of September. This year, we did it again and called it a blitz. In case you missed anything, here is a handy recap. [...]

Kalliopi Monoyios is an independent science illustrator. She has illustrated several popular science books including Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish and The Universe Within, and Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True. Find her at www.kalliopimonoyios.com.
Kalliopi can be found on Twitter as @symbiartic.

Hannah Bonner is an illustrator who is creating an empire of informative, entertaining kids’ books about paleontology. They remind me of The Magic School Bus series by Joanna Cole: real science conveyed with a wacky sense of humor. Take, for example, Bonner’s “Are You A Mammal?” standardized test. It opens with the following instructions: Instructions: [...]

Kalliopi Monoyios is an independent science illustrator. She has illustrated several popular science books including Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish and The Universe Within, and Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True. Find her at www.kalliopimonoyios.com.
Kalliopi can be found on Twitter as @symbiartic.

Dinosaur fossil mounts can be breathtaking in their grandeur. It’s rare that illustrations of the fossils can have that affect. Scott Hartman has been illustrating dinosaur fossil skeletons for years, and is one of the clearest, most detail-oriented illustrators we are lucky to have describe our favourite, dynamic, prehistoric beasties. And now with his revamped [...]

One of the birds I see most regularly here in southern England is the Eurasian coot Fulica atra. This is another of those oh-so-familiar animals that we see so often that we normally pay it little attention. Stop and look properly, and you’ll discover something pretty incredible. While at Kew Gardens recently I took a [...]

Darren Naish is a science writer, technical editor and palaeozoologist (affiliated with the University of Southampton, UK). He mostly works on Cretaceous dinosaurs and pterosaurs but has an avid interest in all things tetrapod. His publications can be downloaded at darrennaish.wordpress.com. He has been blogging at Tetrapod Zoology since 2006. Check out the Tet Zoo podcast at tetzoo.com! Darren can be found on Twitter as @TetZoo.

Following on from February’s review of Matthew P. Martyniuk’s Beasts of Antiquity: Stem-Birds in the Solnhofen Limestone, it’s time once again to look at another recently published dinosaur-themed book. Anyone who knows anything about Mesozoic dinosaurs will know that the British Isles – England specifically – has a special role in the history of our [...]

Darren Naish is a science writer, technical editor and palaeozoologist (affiliated with the University of Southampton, UK). He mostly works on Cretaceous dinosaurs and pterosaurs but has an avid interest in all things tetrapod. His publications can be downloaded at darrennaish.wordpress.com. He has been blogging at Tetrapod Zoology since 2006. Check out the Tet Zoo podcast at tetzoo.com! Darren can be found on Twitter as @TetZoo.

Via bizarre and unexpected circumstances I recently* found myself secretly and furtively attending a lecture by Brian J. Ford. Ford is a British author and researcher who dabbles widely in matters of science and science communication. As readers interested in dinosaurs will know, Ford made something of a name for himself in the world of [...]

Darren Naish is a science writer, technical editor and palaeozoologist (affiliated with the University of Southampton, UK). He mostly works on Cretaceous dinosaurs and pterosaurs but has an avid interest in all things tetrapod. His publications can be downloaded at darrennaish.wordpress.com. He has been blogging at Tetrapod Zoology since 2006. Check out the Tet Zoo podcast at tetzoo.com! Darren can be found on Twitter as @TetZoo.

Recent months have seen the publication of several new dinosaur-themed books, and in this and several future articles I want to share brief thoughts on them. This article represents another effort to get through my backlog of books-needing-reviews. To work… Matthew P. Martyniuk’s Beasts of Antiquity: Stem-Birds in the Solnhofen Limestone is a new, fantastically [...]

Darren Naish is a science writer, technical editor and palaeozoologist (affiliated with the University of Southampton, UK). He mostly works on Cretaceous dinosaurs and pterosaurs but has an avid interest in all things tetrapod. His publications can be downloaded at darrennaish.wordpress.com. He has been blogging at Tetrapod Zoology since 2006. Check out the Tet Zoo podcast at tetzoo.com! Darren can be found on Twitter as @TetZoo.

Anyone who knows anything about Mesozoic dinosaurs will be – or certainly should be – familiar with the fact that our view of what these animals looked like in life has changed substantially within the last several decades. The ‘dinosaur renaissance’ of the late 1960s and 70s saw the flabby-bodied, tail-dragging behemoths of earlier decades [...]

Darren Naish is a science writer, technical editor and palaeozoologist (affiliated with the University of Southampton, UK). He mostly works on Cretaceous dinosaurs and pterosaurs but has an avid interest in all things tetrapod. His publications can be downloaded at darrennaish.wordpress.com. He has been blogging at Tetrapod Zoology since 2006. Check out the Tet Zoo podcast at tetzoo.com! Darren can be found on Twitter as @TetZoo.

Some time round about 165 million years ago, the group of small, feathered dinosaurs that we call birds evolved from within the theropod radiation (theropods are the so-called ‘predatory dinosaurs’: the great group that includes animals like Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor as well as the birds). As anyone reasonably familiar with recent palaeontological discoveries will know, [...]

Darren Naish is a science writer, technical editor and palaeozoologist (affiliated with the University of Southampton, UK). He mostly works on Cretaceous dinosaurs and pterosaurs but has an avid interest in all things tetrapod. His publications can be downloaded at darrennaish.wordpress.com. He has been blogging at Tetrapod Zoology since 2006. Check out the Tet Zoo podcast at tetzoo.com! Darren can be found on Twitter as @TetZoo.

If you pay any attention to the world of zoological research (as you will do, given that you’re reading a blog called Tetrapod Zoology), you’ll know that the study of anatomy has very much come to the fore in recent years. Previously bemoaned as a Victorian pursuit that had had its day and was inferior [...]

Darren Naish is a science writer, technical editor and palaeozoologist (affiliated with the University of Southampton, UK). He mostly works on Cretaceous dinosaurs and pterosaurs but has an avid interest in all things tetrapod. His publications can be downloaded at darrennaish.wordpress.com. He has been blogging at Tetrapod Zoology since 2006. Check out the Tet Zoo podcast at tetzoo.com! Darren can be found on Twitter as @TetZoo.

No time to finish anything new, gah. In desperation, here’s a classic article from the Tet Zoo archives, originally published in March 2009. It has some minor updates. I used to receive random unsolicited emails from an individual who strongly promoted the idea that birds could not not not not be dinosaurs, that the entire [...]

Darren Naish is a science writer, technical editor and palaeozoologist (affiliated with the University of Southampton, UK). He mostly works on Cretaceous dinosaurs and pterosaurs but has an avid interest in all things tetrapod. His publications can be downloaded at darrennaish.wordpress.com. He has been blogging at Tetrapod Zoology since 2006. Check out the Tet Zoo podcast at tetzoo.com! Darren can be found on Twitter as @TetZoo.

Regular readers of Tet Zoo might know that I’ve published extensively on the theropod dinosaurs of a famous and much-studied Lower Cretaceous rock unit known as the Wealden Supergroup. Wealden rocks range in age from Berriasian to Aptian (that is, they were deposited between about 145 and 120 million years ago) and are most famous [...]

Darren Naish is a science writer, technical editor and palaeozoologist (affiliated with the University of Southampton, UK). He mostly works on Cretaceous dinosaurs and pterosaurs but has an avid interest in all things tetrapod. His publications can be downloaded at darrennaish.wordpress.com. He has been blogging at Tetrapod Zoology since 2006. Check out the Tet Zoo podcast at tetzoo.com! Darren can be found on Twitter as @TetZoo.

This isn’t a normal scheduled blog post; instead, it concerns some announcements. Firstly, TetZooCon – the first ever Tetrapod Zoology Convention – is go. It will be held at the London Wetland Centre (UK) on Saturday 12th July and you can now book for attendance. Our schedule is pretty much sorted: we have a series on [...]

Darren Naish is a science writer, technical editor and palaeozoologist (affiliated with the University of Southampton, UK). He mostly works on Cretaceous dinosaurs and pterosaurs but has an avid interest in all things tetrapod. His publications can be downloaded at darrennaish.wordpress.com. He has been blogging at Tetrapod Zoology since 2006. Check out the Tet Zoo podcast at tetzoo.com! Darren can be found on Twitter as @TetZoo.